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Sunday, November 6, 2011

The nice people at Babycastles called us to setup "Go away, norman" as part of their closing party on Friday along with the winning games from the Parsons game jam. It was a pleasant surprise and I was totally kicked to show the game at Babycastles! (If you don't know what Babycastles parties are about here is an article from someone who can explain it much better - http://www.diedagain.com/a-laymans-take-on-babycastles)

We got one of the cabinets to setup our game and we hooked up my laptop to the monitor and one of the gamepad controller they had to my Mac. Made some last minute fixes to the code so that the game is centered on the screen and we were ready to go. Everything was looking ok when someone found a bug - if the mouse went off the screen on the right the game was essentially on a never ending loop and it could be easily reproduced. I had to go behind the cabinet and fix it in 'vi' to add the extra check in the javascript. There is a charm with working with these physical things and hacked up code. Makes you feel more like Steve Jobs and Wozniack hacking on their first computer.

The party was a blast! There were performances by Ava Luna followed by the legendary Wu Tang clan. It was such a great feeling to see people walk up to our game and play it. The best part was when people actually got excited as they were almost caught by norman. We have some ways to go before it becomes a proper game - but it was nice to see people enjoy for what it is currently.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Back from the dead. After two exciting years find myself in a different job and New York. A new start. Hopefully will not ignore my game creation itch this time.

It got rebooted thanks to the amazing folks at Babycastles and Parson school of design, who organized a game jam about a week ago.

Teamed up with the amazing geejay who handled everything from art to sound to level design as I floundered to finish the game code in 48 hours. I knew writing code from scratch in a game jam was bad idea - but I didn't have time to prepare on anything else. So just Javascript and HTML5 canvas it was. Spent a stupid amount of time on the collision detection. If I did it again I would probably just figure out some engine with basic collision detection before the game jam.

The theme of the game jam was any tweet from @Horse_ebooks and we picked "Solution to Cat behavior problems" and "It will catch up with you". So here it is our game - "go away, norman"